Present-day Ponca, Nebraska, is near the first village built by the Ponca in the early 1600s after they separated from the Omaha and became their own tribe. Like the Omaha, they lived in semi-permanent earth lodge villages, planted corn, and hunted bison part of the year. Oral tradition states that the Ponca created a buffalo effigy mound in the vicinity of the village, using it for ceremonial purposes to ensure a bountiful hunt. The Ponca eventually abandoned the village due to the deaths of many children and youth from epidemic diseases. The tribe began calling it the Tiny (or Narrow) Graves Village. The Ponca moved to the Black Hills before settling in the Niobrara River Valley. They returned periodically to the old village, giving it other names such as “Where the Ioway Farmed.” It is said that the tribe continued to stop at the village on their way to the buffalo hunt and continued practicing their ceremonies at the buffalo effigy. This long history of tribal connections makes this area a valuable historical and cultural landscape for the Ponca people.
]]>A marker, 200 feet to the south, recalls the death of White Buffalo Girl of the Ponca tribe. The death of this child, daughter of Black Elk and Moon Hawk, symbolizes the tragic 1877 removal of the Ponca from their homeland on the Niobrara River to Indian Territory in present Oklahoma.
Treaties in 1858 and 1865 greatly reduced the size of the original Ponca Reservation, yet the tribe remained peaceful. An 1868 error in the Treaty of Fort Laramie ceded Ponca lands to their enemy the Dakota Sioux, resulting in eight years of repeated raids against the Ponca and ending with the forced removal of the tribe to the new reservation.
The journey to Indian Territory was plagued by muddy roads and floods caused by heavy spring rains. Most of the tribe suffered from disease and hardship. Several children like White Buffalo Girl perished and were buried along this route that became known as the Ponca "Trail of Tears." The people of Neligh provided a Christian funeral for the child and an oak cross was erected at the gravesite. Black Elk's last request was that the grave of his daughter would be honored and cared for by the people of the town. In 1913 a marble monument was erected and the grave has been maintained and decorated in memory of White Buffalo Girl and the Ponca.
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